Law Commons^™

Homes With Tails: What If You Could Own Your Internet Connection?, Tim Wu, Derek Slater

Faculty Scholarship

America's communications infrastructure is stuck at a copper wall. For the vast majority of homes, copper wires remain the principal means of getting broadband services. The deployment of fiber optic connections to the home would enable exponentially faster connections, and few dispute that upgrading to more robust infrastructure is essential to America's economic growth. However, the costs of such an upgrade are daunting for private sector firms and even for governments. These facts add up to a public policy challenge.

Our intuition is that an innovative model holds unrealized promise: household investments in fiber. Consumers may one day purchase and …

Recent Developments In Us Copyright Law – Part Ii, Caselaw: Exclusive Rights On The Ebb?, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The 1976 Act announces broad exclusive rights, offset by a myriad of specific exemptions, and one wide exception for "fair use." In words and intent, the exclusive rights are capacious, but new technologies may have caused some of the general phrases to become more constraining than might have been expected from a text whose drafters took pains to make forward-looking. Thus, the scope of the reproduction right turns on the meaning of "copy;" the reach of the distribution right on "distribute copies" and "transfer of ownership;" the range of the public performance right on "public" and "perform." Entrepreneurs and users …